ArcSoft to Debut Total Media Theatre 5

[mikinho]

Original Article Link

As a non-3D HDTV owner I’m not too enthusiastic about the new version but I am very pleased to see a mainstream video playback software supporting GPU processing via OpenCL.  I’ve been waiting for OpenCL to get some love in the HTPC world  8)

[Meester.Rip]

I didn’t know there was a TMT 4. My current TMT setup works so I won’t be breaking it. I wonder if they are going to tweak it so it does won’t work on Windows 8 and force you to upgrade.

[Chasseur]

I don’t think there is a TMT4…
I’m using TMT3, but it’s painfull with bluray. 1 on 4 disk I try won’t play correctly, most of the time is audio problems.

I hope one day I will have a reliable bluray player in my htpc. Yesterday, wife told me: “this is the last time I rent a bluray!!! I’ll stay with dvds”

[DavidStein]

Are you sure its not something else in your htpc? ive been using it without issue for blu-rays.

[Chasseur]

Well, there is more than 1 problem.

Sometimes, I have to download an TMT update or the bluray won’t play. Do stand alone bluray players have to be firmware updated that often? I don’t believe…

Sometimes, if I press pause, and then play, the audio is garbage and I have to reboot.

Sometimes, the audio works only in the menus, and not during the movie.

Sometimes, AnyDVD must be running or the bluray won’t play.

[jbachman2]

Yeah, I’ll stick with TMT3 as long as I can. 

[htpc_user]

I use PowerDVD 9, and I have been pretty pleased recently.  It’s been as stable as a standalone player (or as stable as I guess a standalone player would be, since I don’t own one).  Early on I had problems with PowerDVD, and early on I had problems with TMT.  I don’t use TMT much; lately I’ve actually used it only to play mkv’s.  I can’t really say how stable TMT is for playing bluray.  I get the feeling that PowerDVD is the “Microsoft” of bluray software.  I don’t get that so much on this forum, but around the web and other forums it seems it’s not “cool” to use PowerDVD and TMT is more of an “anti-establishment” player, LOL.

[Chasseur]

Funny how you compare PowerDVD and TMT. I selected TMT a long time ago because integration with MCE seemed better at that time.

Maybe it’s time to give PowerDVD another try…

[mikinho]

I like having both myself.  When one of the players have faults w/ a new Blu-ray then the other will almost always work. 

FWIW I’ve had more issues lately w/ TMT3 than PDVD10.  It took TMT3 a while to fix audio issues w/ Red Cliff and the menu system on certain versions of Avatar.

PDVD10 has a more fluid Media Center integration than PDVD9 and TMT3 with the exception of TMT3’s BDMV folder playback support.

In regards to your comment on PDVD not being “cool” to use.  I feel that is in large part due to their removal of BDMV support back in PDVD 7.3.4617.0.  PDVD8 was also incredibly buggy and bloated for Blu-ray while TMT2 was a little more lean and stable.

[Mike Garcen]

lack of BDMV support was a showstopper for me and a reason i’ll never be able to go back to PDVD

[mikinho]

btw, I commented to someone the other day that I thought TMT4 (why did they skip a version?) was coming around the corner since Arcsoft has been fairly slow to release updates lately.

Hopefully we will see an update soon though.

[captain_video]

I’m using PDVD 10 to play BD iso’s and it’s worked flawlessly for me in Media Center.  I get HD audio playback via HDMI and one-touch playback using mikinho’s automount utility with VirtualCloneDrive.  I’ve also got full transport controls using my Media Center remote.  I had used TMT 2.5 (?) with my Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 sound card but I can’t say it really gave me more of a warm fuzzy than PDVD 8 Ultra that I had also been using.

[Meester.Rip]

I originally went with TMT 2 back in the day because PDVD wouldn’t play folder structures via command line from MyMovies. Then once I paid for it there was no reason to buy another version until Win 7 came out and TMT2 didn’t work right on it. But at that time PDVD was having its issues with BD. It seems they were always one step (6 months or so) behind TMT.

The only issue I have now is what Chasseer said about downloading an update. For me it isn’t the player looking for an update it is AnyDVDHD looking for one. Which I understand because I only get this issue on a BD that has been released for only a day or two. The annoying thing is that this message pops up behind the GUI and it is so rare I tend to think I need to do a restart. As it is shutting down I see that little popup that was behind the player GUI.

And new protection schemes do cause older players to fail. My father in-law has an old Samsung that doesn’t play a lot of the new releases and the firmware updates are always way behind.

I’d look at the AVSForums about sounds issues with TMT. I think there are some settings that might have to be adjusted in TMT itself.

[mikinho]

[quote=”Meester.Rip”]
I’d look at the AVSForums about sounds issues with TMT. I think there are some settings that might have to be adjusted in TMT itself.
[/quote]

There are a few known bugs w/ TMT3 that they have an update pending on.

Other times, like you mention you can adjust the settings within TMT3.  But the problem is that you need to do it in an awkward manner.  To adjust audio settings you need to launch TMT3 from Media Center when there is no disc in the drive and make the setting changes there.  You can’t change default settings when there is a disc detected.

[Meester.Rip]

Hmmm. Is there an option to have BD movies fill in the blank bars top and bottom?

[Author]

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